CV: The morning meetings that I have here started on day one at the Bovis site setup over on One World Financial Center. They were originally run by Jim Abadie, the Head of Construction for Bovis Land Lease. He's actually the Vice President and Mike Marone and Nick Brezzizi. Those three fellows were the initial guys down here. They started the meetings in that location. We'll call it our shanty. The DDC had their meetings with all of their in-house people and the engineering staff and all the major players from the different contractors up at IS89. So there would be a 9:00 meeting at IS89 and Jim Abadie and Mike and Nick would come back from that meeting with the daily plan to hand off to the guys that were all sitting there waiting to find out what it is we're going to do now. The communication in our trailer and in our quadrant was very good.

Eventually, Tully, AMEX, Tishman, and all of their foreman that were heading up their excavations and their recovery operations, their General Superintendents and their normal superintendents would start filtering into the Bovis trailer in the morning because we would be sitting there with the entire team. We always had the fire department attend our meetings. We were very well organized in that trailer in that situation. Then as we moved out of the trailers and some of the guys got reassigned, I guess I just kind of took over that meeting and moved it into the trailer. Slowly we outgrew the trailer.

Our meetings started off with anywhere from ten people in the meeting to today we still have anywhere from thirty to forty people every morning from every contractor and every civil service that you have here. I mean we started out with a couple of small health and safety guys. Now we have Liberty Mutual, we have OSHA, besides our own proactive people in all of these meetings, we have the Department of Health, you have some guys from the Department of Sanitation. Anybody that has questions or wants to find out what's going on on the job site has always been able to come to these eight -- to these early morning meetings to find out what the plan of the day was. Then we would start to project plans, look ahead for the weeks to come, for the excavation of the tieback installation, for the dewaterings systems, for the debris and the controlled demolitions of the remaining structures that were throughout the site. So everybody got on the same page real quick.

I've always said that the communication on this job was second to none and it was the key to the success that we've had all along. Getting people together to discuss their problems, not necessarily to discuss them but to come up with an immediate solution. I've had several people walk into the meetings with problems and I've always said that this is a room for solutions. It's not a room for problems. So anybody that ever had a concern could come to the meetings. We've always had a meeting at the beginning of the shift and we've always had a meeting at the close of the shift. It was important to keep the balance of continuity out there with the turnover of the shifts. We were originally started working twelve-hour shifts.

At the beginning of the job, guys were staying here twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours straight just to keep continuity amongst the tradesmen that were out there performing the work. Then that developed into three eight-hour shifts with the supervision. So I would stay -- I would get here early in the morning to cross over with the night guys that left at seven, turn over at the 8:00 meeting, and then I would stay till the 5:30 meetings with the night crew that would come into work 5 to midnight. And those guys would stay to overlap with the midnight to seven crew again. So there was always continuity in the plan that we had laid out on the table. And that became carved in stone. Everybody must attend. I never had a problem with anybody attending because everybody wanted to know what was going on. And this is where they find out what's going on.

CV: When I walk around the job site I pay attention to everything. Safety being number one, making sure that the operation that's happening regardless of where it is or who's doing it is being done, that there are spotters from the simple things of having guys spotting with each particular piece of equipment so that you don't have uniformed service members working without knowing that the machines are being operated in a safe manner. Ten I would be checking the progress of each operation that would be happening during the day. And I would come in at nights to make sure that we were moving in the same continuous way that we had set up during the day.

And when I walk around the job site, it's basically to make sure that everybody's doing what they need to do the right way and also to stop and talk to guys and just to be out there in case somebody needs something. I find that when I walk the job site, I can go around this job site and say to myself, "Charlie, you're just going to go take a quick walk around and you got to be back here in fifteen minutes to do your paperwork." I won't get back here for an hour and a half or sometimes two hours or sometimes I won't come back to the office for the whole day because you'll always run into a situation out there that needs attendance by somebody, what be it, a different piece of equipment needs to be introduced to complete the task at hand or whether you need a professional opinion on something. That would be my job -- to get the communication out there in the field to the proper people to make a decision on how we're going to move forward.

CV: If I needed to change a piece of equipment on a moment's notice, most of the time it would be due to the task that that piece of equipment was trying to perform. If I had a 320 grappler in the middle of everything and we just entered a new debris field with forty ton beams in the way, I knew that piece of equipment wasn't going to be successful at moving any of that stuff. I would talk to the operator and I would ask him how he thinks he's doing and he would say, "Charlie, I'm really not effective over here. Why don't you get a 750 over here?" So I would then get on the radio and I would make that switch and try to find a spot where this guy could work effectively and keep going for the recovery.

<< 3 >>